Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

Among the 800 or so employees laid off by Microsoft today: Don Dodge, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development for the Emerging Business Team, reporting to VP Dan’l Lewin. Don writes about the change on his personal blog.

All layoffs suck, but letting Don go is a huge mistake for Microsoft. He nearly singlehandedly defends the Microsoft brand in a fairly anti-Microsoft developer and user community. For many people in the startup community, Don is the face of Microsoft. He travels constantly, speaking at events whenever he’s asked, and makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back.

Don has been an expert panelist at all three TechCrunch50 conferences. He has also written guest posts for us covering startup events we couldn’t attend personally.

His reaction to today’s news shows what kind of person he is. I reached him by telephone just an hour after he heard the news. And he didn’t have a bad word to say about Microsoft. He was more concerned that I not write anything negative about the company than anything else. Even after they turned their back on him, he was still on their side.

My opinion of Microsoft dropped a notch today. A big notch. Don invested years of his time making Microsoft seem more human, and there are very few people I respect more than this man. He wasted all that time, apparently.

While the Nintendo Wii continues to have a stranglehold on console sales, both worldwide and in the United States, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are battling it out for the the second place position for year-to-date sales. Just a little over two months ago, Sony announced that they would be slashing the price of their game console, the PS3, to $299. Microsoft quickly followed suit, and in just ten days dropped the price of their most expensive console, the Xbox 360 Elite, to $299. Nintendo, who has sold nearly double the number of consoles worldwide as these two, decided to lower the price of the Wii on September 27th to $199: this was the first time since its inception that the Wii has had a price cut. All three console manufacturers hoped that the decrease in price would help them to increase sales and finish the year on a strong note. The results have been mixed: while all three consoles have seen an increase in sales, the PS3 has seen astonishing growth in the US and abroad, and has wrestled the second-place position in worldwide YTD sales from the 360. As for the Xbox, even in its upgraded Elite form it has seen only minimal gains since the price drop.

In this political season, why not talk about the roughest political argument of them all: the real meaning of Apple’s announcement of over 100,000 apps in the app store. Are these apps important because, as Steve Ballmer says, the iPhone doesn’t handle the Internet well? Are these apps a testament to a strong ecosystem? Or are these apps a testament to Apple’s marketing might and the perception that you just might make your millions by selling flashlight app for the Touch.

The announcement, which basically says that there are over 100,000 applications available for the iPhone and iPod Touch with some of the true winners – Smule’s I Am T-Pain, for example – getting 10,000 or more downloads a day.

OpenX this morning announced it has entered into a multi-year partnership with Microsoft that will allow the companies to “cross-market and promote products” to their respective publishers.

Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle, has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle. “It’s kind of creepy,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem.

But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

The mobile version of Bing launched alongside the regular site this past summer worked well but lacked some of the bells and whistles that rivals like Google offer in their mobile experience. And with the mobile web becoming increasingly important, a focus on this area is crucial for a fledgling search engine. So today Bing has unveiled a new version of its mobile experience.

The main change is that Bing has been completely revamped for touchscreen smartphones and devices. Currently, this means the G1, the Verizon Imagio, the Samsung Omnia, the Zune HD, and yes, the iPhone. In its blog post, Bing even uses a picture to highlight how nice Bing Mobile looks on the Apple device.

Maybe you’ll recall when I ripped apart the Bing jingle winner back in August. It was bad — real bad. But its creator, Jonathan Mann is a talented guy, and even made a jingle ripping me, which was both better than the Bing one, and funny. Sadly, Microsoft now controls his Bing jingle and is subjecting little children to it.

As you can see in the video below, Microsoft has forced a bunch of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania to learn and perform Mann’s Bing song. The horror. It’s hard to watch this without immediately thinking about parents who accept money to allow their child to be sponsored. Is this the future of branding?

Oh, dear. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was on The Today Show (international viewers: The Today Show is a morning news and entertainment program that airs on NBC, a big TV network here) to unveil Windows 7. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a first-gen MacBook Pro in the background? Good job, NBC!

Click through for video.

I upgraded three computers to Snow Leopard a couple of months ago, and one of them, a newish iMac, is still a brick. So even though I’m a loyal Mac user (just not the iPhone any more), it still pisses me off to see them trashing Windows 7 in a new Mac v. PC commercial. Windows 7 looks like a very solid operating system. It might even work just fine on that iMac. So give it a rest already, Apple. (via Erictric)

Today is Windows 7 launch day, and everyone is having a party. In fact, Microsoft’s helpful Windows 7 launch party prepping video is already an instant Internet classic.

But there’s more than one way to have a Windows 7 launch party. The Funny or Die spoof video above shows you how to have a Windows 7 torrenting party, and even gives tips for how not to get arrested. (Warning: there are a few f-bombs at the end). Windows 7 can be so much fun! But what’s with the British accents?

Microsoft has set up a Twitter account called @MicrosoftHelps and aims to provide Windows 7 customer support on the hot micro-sharing service, writes Sarah Perez over at Channel 10.

The account has been around for a week or so but hasn’t been met with much attention so far. That’s a shame, because I honestly think it’s really interesting to see Microsoft set up a customer service channel on Twitter, much like Best Buy recently amazed me with its @Twelpforce endeavors.

Coinciding with the worldwide debut of Windows 7 and the launch of physical retail stores throughout the world, Microsoft has revamped its online store as well.

The news comes from Trevin Chow, Senior Lead Program Manager for Microsoft Store.

Big surprise: the revamped online storefront features some new categories (including ‘Computers’!), so you can now go there to buy Windows 7 PCs as well as accessories and even third-party software like Adobe Photoshop and Nero 9.

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO sat down to talk with Federated Media’s John Battelle.

Sandberg’s key point through all the questions was clear: Facebook is all about sharing. But it’s different from a competitor like Twitter because you can use Facebook to easily share with one person, just your high school friends, or the world.

Sandberg also noted that Facebook sees a shift going on from an information economy to a social economy. This can be thought of a move from everyone just using Google to get information, to using social services like Facebook and Twitter.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today Microsoft’s President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Qi Lu, spoke with Tim O’Reilly. He hit on some of his overall goals with Microsoft and search, but the real story was clear: The deal between Microsoft and Twitter to inject real-time tweets into Bing’s results. Yes, the deal is real and it’s a key part of what Microsoft is calling “Bing Wave 2.”

Another part of Bing Wave 2 is Facebook data, but that will come later, and it’s vague as to how that will work. Today was all about Twitter as Lu introduced another Microsoft employee who works under him to demo the new version of Bing (screenshots below).

Microsoft will announce the integration of real time status updates from both Twitter and Facebook into Bing at the Web 2.0 Summit today, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deals. The announcement will be made by Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, later this morning.

The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information.

Similar deals with Google have been rumored for some time, and we’ve confirmed that at least Twitter has been in discussions with Google around a data deal for months. But Bing is going to be first to announce these deals.

Today, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Dev team released a humorous video giving a sneak peek inside the Microsoft Apps Lab. Here, you get a behind-the-scenes look at a few of the apps Microsoft dreamed up for its new Windows Marketplace, but were forced to reject for various reasons ranging from stupidity to lawsuits to physical pain.

As Microsoft and Yahoo await government approval of their pending deal to join their two search businesses at the hip, the two companies received an important endorsement today from the world’s top advertisers.

In a letter today from the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and signed by the CEOs of the Publicis Groupe, WPP, Interpublic, and Omnicom, the advertisers gave their full support to the deal, urging “the Department of Justice to bring its antitrust review to a speedy conclusion.” The letter notes that the deal would strengthen Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search advertising offerings, and thus would be good for competition.

Microsoft is making a significant announcement for developers today, upgrading and adding functionality to Visual Studio 2010 to make the product more cloud-friendly in anticipation of Microsoft’s release of its commercial cloud platform Azure. Visual Studio is Microsoft’s a development environment that can be used to develop web applications, sites and services based on Microsoft’s technology platforms.

Visual Studio 2010 will have additional testing options for developers to ensure quality code. Microsoft has included built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the first time that Microsoft has offered specific tools for building applications off of SharePoint. And with Visual Studio, developers can also build applications that cut across both Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure and on-premises databases.

Last week, we wrote about the best website ever, wwwtwitter.com. Okay, really it’s just a commonly mistyped domain that is currently redirecting to TechCrunch (and the owner actually updated it to direct to my article specifically — thanks, whoever you are!). In that post, I mentioned that while many big name brands own the wwwBRANDNAME.com domain and forward it to their real one, Microsoft did not own it for their current darling site, Bing.

At the time, the domain simply pointed to a page with a bunch of links. But since our story, the author decided to do something a bit more fun with it. As you can see now, wwwbing.com is a lovely page featuring a squatting troll. As a bonus, the troll is picking its nose and snot appears to be dripping out.